Weinberger on structural separation
David Weinberger has done us all a favor by explaining structural separation in terms everyone can understand — I hope you will read what he's written here.
Meanwhile, Moscow has two-thirds (600,000) of the fiber connections (about a million) we now have in the entire U.S. (those U.S. connections thanks to Verizon's FiOS program). John Quarterman asks if it's “Sputnik time.” Steve Levy had a fine piece pointing out that “Americans are paying more to putter around the Net at golf-cart speeds
than citizens elsewhere spend to race around the Web in Porsches—often
seven to 10 times as much.“
But the FTC has issued a report saying that, basically, all things considered, when you look at the situation in a certain way, everything is just fine. Reaction from Public Knowledge is here.
At this point in our country's history, the strongest metaphor, the most convincing argument, has a hard time getting through and having an effect on policy. This is a strange, blank-walled time; it will be difficult for Weinberger, Quarterman, Levy, or Public Knowledge to get even a response, much less feel that they're having an impact.
The only branch of government that can help is Congress - the courts will defer to whatever the FCC does, and the executive branch is delighted to keep the incumbents happy (and very unlikely to show any leadership in any creative direction on this issue). But without different leadership in place, Congress is completely unlikely to act in a way that will fix our national highspeed internet access problem.
==
Meanwhile, no one can stand up in a federal court and challenge the President's secret and illegal domestic wiretapping program, because the program is secret. This effectively immunizes the wiretapping scheme from judicial review.
We have standing doctrines for good reasons - they keep courts from wandering into ruling on abstract questions of policy. But this result subverts the work of the Church Committee. If the courts, the executive, and Congress can't help, it's time for the fourth branch — journalists — to reveal even more of the story. And by journalists I mean obsessive, passionate bloggers. Surely there's a leak somewhere.